“Lisa?” Hen gave him a bewildered look. “Why wouldn’t I? She’s my best friend. I can’t wait for her to die so I can catch her up on everything. Oh…tell me…”
She reached over the table and put her hand on Hill’s. It felt odd. He could feel the weight of it, even though he supposed that was just imagination,
“Does she still look good? It can be fixed, but it’s better to die looking…well…in your prime. Like me.” She gestured at her face, fingers brushing the sharp edges of her beak.
“You didn’t look like that when you died,” Hill corrected her. “You’d been sick for months. You were bald.”
She stared at him and then reached up to touch her hair. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I spent a fortune at the hairdresser’s. One thin spot and she’d have had me upside down applying the best treatments from Europe.”
Hill bristled, ready to argue, but…
He’d expected Davy to remember his dad, but it had also seemed in character when he didn’t. Aunt Hen, who’d lived with them for two months with her Yorkie after a spiteful ex had flushed Orbeez into her condo’s plumbing, didn’t have that excuse. And she’d not died suddenly. It had been months of illness and hospitals.
She could just be in denial, but it wasn’t that. It was like when he’d asked what Davy’s real name was, like the answer should be there but wasn’t. The hole had to be papered up with something.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hill said.
Hen’s frown stayed etched between her eyebrows as she stared at him. Before she could say anything, though, the barista called her name. She tried to lift her hand to shush him, but he just yelled the order out again.
“All right,” Hen huffed as she got up. “I’m coming.”
She went over to grab the cups, throwing a thin, tin-dull bit of coin into the tip jar. When she brought the coffees back and setthem down, foam oozed out from under the lid of Hill’s and ran down the side to puddle on the table.
“Do you remember Fraser?” he asked as he pulled a napkin out of the dispenser to wipe the foam. “My…mom’s husband worked for him.”
Hen still looked uneasy, but it passed as she leaned back and nodded.
“Of course,” she said as she popped the top off the cup. She added sugar and jabbed it down through the foam into the coffee with her straw. “Fraser Jones. He was a robot in the sack. Businesslike, but got the job done.”
That was…that was more than Hill had ever wanted to know. He took a second to try and aggressively NOT write that into his long-term memory. To give himself a second to recover, he took a drink of his latte.
….his chest hurt and his eyes stung. He couldn’t breathe, and he never wanted to again.
The attempt to compose himself failed as laughter and coffee snorted down his nose. He fanned himself with one hand and…OK…it was fine. He could do this.
He glanced across the table at his friend’s miserable, mortified face and… Nope.
The more they cringed, the funnier it was.
Hill coughed on the memory of meanness. He wiped foam off his lips on his crumpled-up napkin. He shouldn’t have gotten iced, maybe.
“That’s not really the sort of…information I need,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. I was going to CIRATTA. The receptionist there, the dead one, had to have seen a lot over the years. She—”
Hen rolled her eyes at him and gestured over her shoulder with one finger.
“How much of the living do you see?” she asked. “A lot? A little? Nothing?”
Hill knew what she meant. He looked anyhow. The living world had, if anything, faded back more since that quick, shock flash of solidity. If he squinted he could see them, just as blurred shapes that passed to and fro.
He clung to the idea anyhow. “Fraser isn’t an…affable man. There have to be spirits that want to haunt him. That’d be the first place—”
What he was about to say was muffled as Hen pressed a finger to his mouth.
“Don’t use that word in public,” she said. “What next? Call us…ghosts?”
She muttered the last word under her breath and then looked around quickly, offering an awkward smile to a nearby table that frowned at her.
“Sorry,” she murmured, making a placating hand gesture. “Sorry.”
